Sunday, September 21, 2014

World's Finest Comics #137 - Dec. 1963

Comics Weekend "The Day Aquaman Lost His Powers" by Jack Miller and Ramona Fradon.

It's Adventure Sunday!

Another BIG Aquaman adventure on tap...

Aqualad tells Aquaman to relax, he'll go and retrieve the urn. But when he returns to the scene, he finds the urn gone. Gulp, what now?

Aqualad then heads to the surface, finding the crooks' boat. After accidentally making his presence known, the crooks prepare to open fire, forcing Aqualad to bid a hasty retreat. Luckily, he covers his escape via an attack by some finny friends, who swim out of the water, distracting the bad guys. But Aqualad still has to find some way of getting the urn:

...and so ends another adventure for Aquaman and Aqualad!

Despite being nine pages, this story is stuffed to the gills with action--as if the original script was for an even longer story, and Ramona Fradon had to cram as much in as possible. Check out the first few pages, the word balloons are bursting out of the panel borders, and Aquaman's figure looks ready to do the same.

Also, I know it's a little but goofy, but--I cannot get enough of Aquaman flying through the air on the backs of a bunch of sea eagles. It just looks so cool and exciting. Hawkman, eat your heart out!

Ramona Fradon seems to be pulling out all the stops here. What a fantastic art job. I loved the fast swimming too.

I have to ask...what is with these freakin' sea eagles? They're everywhere. If Aquaman can control them, he should be able to control regular old eagles just as easily, not to mention vultures, canaries, hummingbirds, etc.

Yeah, I forgot to comment on that too. For all this time, we've seen sea eagles keep showing up in Aquaman stories. Any reason why they stopped? Someone deciding actual water-based sea creatres were sufficient? Too broad a level of control? Modern writers having never heard of sea eagles?

For the record, Wikipedia says "Sea eagles" is the general name for eight specific birds of prey species, including the famous American bald eagle:

^Now that's something I never even considered! Would also apply to Aquaman's control over aquatic mammals like seals, whose brains are surely more like dogs and other land-going mammals than they are like fish. You win the comic book Nobel for pseudo-science this week.

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Aquaman's penultimate ADVENTURE story! The loss of his short-story venue with his exit from the pages of ADVENTURE seems especially unfortunate in light of the more interesting direction they had been taking; the trend towards more sci-fi/fantasy material over the last few issues or so was a welcome change from thwarting sunken treasure looters. And of course his departure from ADVENTURE also saw the departure of Fradon from Aquaman's world for many years; another sad loss.